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Quotes about Civilization from the world's top natural health / natural living authors

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"The phrase modern civilization is used with emphasis, for civilization alone does not cause nervousness. The Greeks were certainly civilized, but they were not nervous, and in the Greek language there is no word for that term. . . . The modern differ from the ancient civilizations mainly in these five elements—steam power, the periodical press, the telegraph, the sciences, and the mental activity of women. When civilization, plus these five factors, invades any nation, it must carry nervousness and nervous diseases along with it." - Anne Harrington, The Cure Within: A History of Mind-Body Medicine (Get the book.)

"The pyramids of Giza were the supreme achievement of Old Kingdom Egypt, a civilization founded on the assumption that the pharaoh was the fountain of a prosperous world. Everything depended on the power and spiritual authority of the pharaoh. According to Egyptian belief, the stars were divine beings, and the ruler was destined to take his place among them. "The king goes to his double. ... A ladder is set up for him that he may ascend on it," says a spell in a Royal Pyramid Text.7 Thus, the Old Kingdom pharaohs lavished enormous resources on the building of their pyramids." - Brian Fagan, Floods, Famines, and Emperors: El Nino and the Fate of Civilizations (Get the book.) "If the evidence from the Peruvian coast is correct, El Nino circulations have persisted since at least the beginning of Ancient Egyptian civilization in 3000 B.C. Unfortunately, until someone locates tree-ring sequences of sufficient precision to give annual rainfall fluctuations for the Nile Valley, we will never be able to identify Old Kingdom drought cycles other than from contemporary accounts of somewhat dubious reliability. Current year-by-year records go back just over fifteen hundred years." - Brian Fagan, Floods, Famines, and Emperors: El Nino and the Fate of Civilizations (Get the book.) "The pharaoh and his nobles owned large country estates, as did the major temples, but the breadbasket of Egypt's dazzling civilization rested firmly in the hands of provincial leaders called nomarchs, who presided over hundreds of local communities from Aswan to the delta. Each summer, as the Nile swelled over its banks, small groups of villagers stood watch over their levees, clearing canals and ditches, frantically shoring up collapsing dikes to steer the water to the right drainage basin or storage reservoir." - Brian Fagan, Floods, Famines, and Emperors: El Nino and the Fate of Civilizations (Get the book.) "The cradle of Mesopotamian civilization did not exist. Drowned sand dunes under the northern Gulf and oxygen isotope readings from deep-sea cores tell us the entire region was very dry indeed. After the Younger Dryas ended in about 8000 B.C., seas rose rapidly throughout the world. The rising Indian Ocean penetrated so rapidly into the Persian Gulf in some places that the water advanced northward eleven meters a year, forming a deep indentation in the desert. Fossil tree pollens from Lake Zeribar in Iran tell us that considerably more rain fell in the region at the time. By 6500 B.C." - Brian Fagan, Floods, Famines, and Emperors: El Nino and the Fate of Civilizations (Get the book.)

"Hillslope soils gradually rebuilt during the dark age before the rise of classical Greek civilization. The area was again densely settled in late Roman times and anothet period of depopulation followed in the seventh century ad. About fifteen inches of soil are estimated to have been lost from Argolid uplands since the start of Bronze Age agriculture. As many as three feet of soil may have been stripped from some lowland slopes. Valley bottom sediments of the Argive Plain in the northeastern Pelo-ponnese also testify to four periods of extensive soil erosion in the past five thousand years." - David R. Montgomery, Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations (Get the book.) "Are vague cultural memories of a prior climate and environment recorded in the story of the garden from which humanity was ejected before the rise of civilization? Regardless of how we view such things, the changing climate of the last two million years rearranged the world's ecosystems time and again. The Ice Age was not a single event. More than twenty major glaciations repeatedly buried North America and Europe under ice, defining what geologists call the Quaternary—the fourth era of geologic time." - David R. Montgomery, Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations (Get the book.) "The decline of Sumerian civilization tracked the steady erosion of its agriculture. Falling crop yields made it difficult to feed the army and maintain the bureaucracy that allocated surplus food. As their armies deteriorated, the independent city-states were assimilated by the younger Akkadian empire from northern Mesopotamia at the time of the first serious decline in crop yields around 2300 bc. During the next five hundred years the region fell to a succession of conquerors." - David R. Montgomery, Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations (Get the book.) "Easter Island's native civilization did not disappear overnight. It eroded away as environmental degradation reduced the numbet of people the island could support to fewer than those living there already. Hardly cataclysmic, the outcome was devastating nonetheless. Pollen preserved in lake sediments records an extensive forest cover when a few dozen people colonized Easter Island." - David R. Montgomery, Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations (Get the book.)

"During the middle Bronze Age, a tribal culture called the Nuraghic civilization (in a sense, the root culture of the Sardinian Blue Zone) began in Sardinia, he said. The Nuraghi people are named after the stone towers found all over the island. By the time of Christ, other civilizations had also discovered Sardinia's riches and charms, and for most of its early history the island was knocked around like a rugby ball—invaded, conquered, and exploited by outsiders. The Phoenicians and Romans arrived with their superior military might, taking over the coasts and lowlands of the south." - Dan Buettner, The Blue Zones: Lessons for Living Longer From the People Who've Lived the Longest (Get the book.)

"From the early English settlers on, there have always been two constants in the American domain—"the pale" (i.e., civilization, or some version of it), and "beyond the pale," the line beyond civilization (where the Indians were, or in later iterations, where the Mexicans, the Cubans, the Russians, the Sandinistas, the Grenadian rebels, the Palestinians, the Ayatollah, bin Laden, al Qaeda, and the Iraqi insurgents were, or are)." - Charles Barber, Comfortably Numb: How Psychiatry Is Medicating a Nation (Get the book.)

"They believed in the evolutionary vision promoted by the anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan, who divided human cultural development into Savagery, Barbarism, and civilization. All these men believed that European civilization resided at the top end of the developmental pyramid, and that aristocratic scientists like themselves came from the upper level of civilization's cultural strata.2 Many of the European philosopher-scientists viewed Native Americans, Africans, Indians, Southeast Asians, and all the other conquered tribes and cultures as barbarians and savages." - Will Allen, The War on Bugs (Get the book.)

"On the other hand, when these same people came in contact with our civilization through the establishment of trading posts, rampant tooth decay took place. First generation children developed severe crookedness of teeth, and many of the same diseases and malformations exhibited in modern civilization, including cleft palates, harelips and clubfeet. The items primitives received in trade were much the same everywhere: a few pieces of clothing, some trinkets, certain vegetable oils, jams and jellies, white flour and sugar." - Ron Garner, Conscious Health: A Complete Guide to Wellness Through Natural Means (Get the book.)

"Coronary artery disease is the leading killer of men and women in Western civilization. In the United States alone, more than half a million people die of it every single year. Three times that number suffer known heart attacks. And approximately three million more have "silent" heart attacks, experiencing minimal symptoms and having no idea, until well after the damage is done, that they are in mortal danger. In the course of a lifetime, one out of every two American men and one out of every three American women will have some form of the disease." - Caldwell B. Esselstyn, Jr., M.D., Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease (Get the book.) "We have shown that the number one killer in Western civilization can be abolished, through consumption of a plant-based diet. But we can do much more. If the public adopted this approach to preventing disease, if, by the millions, Americans abandoned their toxic diets and learned a truly healthy approach to eating, we could largely limit all those diseases of nutritional extravagance—strokes, hypertension, obesity, osteoporosis, and adult-onset diabetes. Meanwhile, we would see a marked reduction in cancers of the breast, prostate, colon, rectum, uterus, and ovaries." - Caldwell B. Esselstyn, Jr., M.D., Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease (Get the book.)

"The need for signs graven on the skin having ceased with the progress of civilization, and the pricks seemingly procuring the cure only of a tiny number of maladies, the usage was lost in most nations. This remedy has been conserved only by the Chinese and the Japanese, their neighbors, where all the first institutions are sacred. ... It is from these people that we take the method of acupuncture." - Roberta Bivins, Alternative Medicine?: A History (Get the book.) "Since China was then seen as the pinnacle of non-western civilization, DuHalde's scepticism about Chinese speculative and analytical ability was applicable by extension to all non-European 'science'. The increasingly ambiguous intellectual status of medicine during this period is also revealed in DuHalde's text." - Roberta Bivins, Alternative Medicine?: A History (Get the book.) "A missionary like Busschof had additional reasons to grind the axe of western medicine—it was swiftly becoming a crucial tool for conversion, and a measure of civilization (see Chapter 2). So far, through these famous and influential accounts, I have looked at moxabustion from the patient's perspective. Unlike medical practitioners, neither Temple nor Busschof was heavily invested in any particular medical systems or theories. Thus, they focused on the process and empirical effects of the treatment, rather than on its theoretical underpinnings." - Roberta Bivins, Alternative Medicine?: A History (Get the book.)

"They are also far more dependent upon highly dense host populations, which among humans are almost entirely an artifact of the last ten millennia, the period in which agriculture and settled communities started humanity down the path to civilization.13 Measles, as an example, will die out in a population of less than five hundred thousand, either killing or immunizing everyone before they can produce offspring.14 The disease spread by Y. pestis, on the other hand, is vulnerable to neither of these evolutionary correctives." - William Rosen, Justinian's Flea: The First Great Plague and the End of the Roman Empire (Get the book.) "Most historians of lare antiquity have tended to scant the impott of the demon—of any disease—choosing more traditional narrative elements to tell the story of classical civilization's last days. Their preference is understandable. At first glance, the tools of history seem somehow ill-matched to a story whose leading character is a creature with no sense of history, or without even a sense of self-awareness. The first glance, however, is deceiving." - William Rosen, Justinian's Flea: The First Great Plague and the End of the Roman Empire (Get the book.)

"Multiplied by millions, she is a focus of bitterness and discontent in the whole fabric of our civilization. Perhaps Wilson's own tongue had been sharpened by the support his foundation was receiving from several drug companies, including the manufacturer of Premarin. In 1965 the Wilson Research Foundation received $34,000 (the equivalent of about $175,000 in 2004 dollars) in contributions from drug companies, enough to cover Wilson's expenses while he was writing his book. In total, Wilson's foundation received $1.3 million from drug companies." - John Abramson, Overdosed America: The Broken Promise of American Medicine (P.S.) (Get the book.)

"The Vandal king's Moorish hosts were not as accustomed to civilization as his own people, and Gelimet, a man of some musical and literary pretension, actually spent part of the siege composing an ode bemoaning his lack of a sponge. When he finally surrendered, he evidently did so believing that it was preferable to be a clean slave of Justinian than an unwashed king of the Vandals. The glory of Belisarius's triumph was in no way diminished by the ease with which it was gained, and upon his general's return, Justinian determined on a public appreciation." - William Rosen, Justinian's Flea: The First Great Plague and the End of the Roman Empire (Get the book.)

"When civilization, plus these five factors, invades any nation, it must carry nervousness and nervous diseases along with it.4 Why would all of these modern developments result in nervousness? Beard found his understandings and explanations in the modern world itself. Friendly with the American inventor Thomas Alva Edison, Beard drew on Edison's work on the electric lightbulb as a rich source of metaphors for thinking about the dynamics of the exhausted human body." - Anne Harrington, The Cure Within: A History of Mind-Body Medicine (Get the book.)

"His next maneuvers, therefore, were almost cerrainly nothing more than a calculated delaying tactic, but they are generally seen to carry a sturdier metaphorical weight, symbolizing, perhaps, the eternal conflict between barbarism and civilization." - William Rosen, Justinian's Flea: The First Great Plague and the End of the Roman Empire (Get the book.)

"Certainly, the separation of practice from theory in the case of acupuncture was intimately related to European perceptions of Chinese natural and medical knowledge as devoid of merit (beyond its antiquarian interest as an earlier stage of civilization)." - Roberta Bivins, Alternative Medicine?: A History (Get the book.)

"This is the raw, cutting odor of the jungle, the gash of the tropics, the fetor of equatorial darkness, the essence of everything Western civilization glosses over, dyes and tries to not think about. The epicenter of this olfactory swamp seems to be a corner where crates of eviscerated frogs are piled next to barrels containing thousands of squirming crabs. The sharp odor of the splayed amphibians, their steaming organs perfuming the night air, mingles with the decomposing crabby emanations to create a stench nobody should ever have to experience again." - Adam Leith Gollne, The Fruit Hunters: A Story of Nature, Adventure, Commerce and Obsession (Get the book.)

"Deep insight welling from the most basic instincts of our species for collective survival is what we need, for that—combined with the basic wisdom deposited in the great spiritual traditions and rediscovered at the cutting edge of the sciences—can lead us to a condition that is truly viable: to a civilization that is holistic, peaceful, and sustainable. Deep insight is a reliable resource, for it is the purest contact we can have with reality, contact uncorrupted by pretension and unadorned by sophistry." - Ervin Laszlo, Quantum Shift in the Global Brain: How the New Scientific Reality Can Change Us and Our World (Get the book.) "Brings together leading thinkers and visionaries to discuss the problems facing the world community and produce a realistic vision of a civilization that is peaceful and sustainable, in balance with itself and with nature (the World Wisdom Council). 140 5. Conducts periodic surveys of the new cultures of solidarity and responsibility in various countries and regions of the world to establish their size, composition, and values and to communicate the results to the new cultures as well as to the public at large (the International Survey of Emergent Cultures). 6." - Ervin Laszlo, Quantum Shift in the Global Brain: How the New Scientific Reality Can Change Us and Our World (Get the book.)

"Other fruits, if eaten, were usually processed before being consumed. civilization was turning away from wilderness. The advent of food preparation, wrote Levi-Strauss in The Raw and the Cooked, "marks the transition from nature to culture." Only through human cultivation were fruits improved and selected for desirable characteristics: smaller seeds, increased flesh and refined eating quality. This discredits the assumption that wild fruits are tastiest—in truth, uncultivated varieties are often inedible. The wild peach is an acrid pea-sized pellet." - Adam Leith Gollne, The Fruit Hunters: A Story of Nature, Adventure, Commerce and Obsession (Get the book.) "Cebil, the "seeds of civilization," are used to access another level of reality. Smoking banana peels, said to be hallucinogenic, is a rite of passage that usually ends in a headache. The Waika of Venezuela use the beans of yopo fruits in a bizarre ritual where one man blows the fruit snuff through a long pipe into another man's nose. When he snorts it up, pandemonium ensues. The psychotropic quality that many fruits possess is actually a form of toxicity. Plants contain poisons intended to deter small animals from messing with them." - Adam Leith Gollne, The Fruit Hunters: A Story of Nature, Adventure, Commerce and Obsession (Get the book.)

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